Commuters rushing through Grand Central Station on Tuesday were treated to a curious sight: A glass cube filled with actors in business casual, miming the mundane motions of office work. But, if you stopped for a minute—as many did—things looked a little off. The computers weren’t sleek Apple monitors but old-school data processors. And yes, one of those actors was Adam Scott, star of Apple’s hit sci-fi drama Severance, which returns for a much anticipated second season on Jan. 17.
For the uninitiated, the show centers on a group of workers who have agreed to undergo the process of severance, brain surgery that separates their work lives from their personal lives. The characters refer to these two personas as “innies” and “outies.” The outies walk into the offices of the mysterious company Lumon and take an elevator down to the windowless “severed floor” at which point their “innie” clocks in. The outies don’t remember a single moment of menial labor from their work day. Their innies, by contrast, live a nightmarish existence. They are trapped inside Lumon’s offices, doomed to work on a dull yet mysterious project, never to see the light of day—until, late in the show’s first season, the workers decide to rebel.
In the run-up to Friday’s premiere, the Apple TV+ marketing team recreated Severance’s drab-chic cubicles inside a glass box in the iconic station’s Vanderbilt Hall, a place whose grandness belies the drudgery plaguing so many of the commuters crossing through it. Actors from the show, including Scott, Britt Lower, John Turturro, and Zach Cherry, toiled in their tiny office with Patricia Arquette and Tramell Tillman, who play their bosses, overseeing their work. At one point Arquette’s character “punished” Scott’s character by forcing him to stand in a corner and stare at the onlookers outside the box.
Unsurprisingly, the pop-up went viral on social media, generating largely favorable responses. Whether it will move the needle on Apple’s comparatively modest streaming numbers, even for one of its crown jewels, remains to be seen. But gauging from a metric of (online) public sentiment—does this endear us to the product being marketed, or make us want to boycott it?—the pop-up was a resounding success.
Audiences have been treated to—or forced to endure, depending on how you see it—an endless array of movie and TV marketing stunts over the past couple of years. There was the Barbie onslaught which saw Warner Bros. and Mattel plastering the iconic doll’s branding on products ranging from pool floaties to rugs. That movie’s star Margot Robbie literally dressed like actual Barbies for months. Meanwhile, Zendaya mastered the art of thematic dressing on the red carpet, stunning with her tennis-inspired fits for Challengers and her futuristic looks for Dune: Part 2.
The Wicked marketing team took pages out of both Barbie and Zendaya’s books: They produced Wicked-themed macaroni and cheese, crocs, and tequila, and clad their stars in pink and green for every appearance on the red carpet, at junkets, and even in the stands at the Olympics. (Barbie collaborated with 165 brands in 2023. Wicked topped that by teaming with 400 brands in 2024.)
There are star-dependent marketing gambits, like Timothée Chalamet’s recent epic run catering to just about every moviegoing demographic ahead of the release of his Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. He impressed with his picks on College GameDay on ESPN, showed up at his own lookalike contest, and (curiously) took to Instagram live to thrash around to the Black Eyed Peas song “I’ve Gotta Feeling.” We Live in Time star Andrew Garfield’s flirtatious meal with Amelia Dimoldenberg on Chicken Shop Date went viral last fall, as did his tearful guest appearance on the Modern Love podcast.
Then there are the marketing campaigns that don’t depend on celebrity. Instead, they aim to go viral through shock value, like the creepy smiling fans seated behind the dugout at a playoff game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets, promoting Smile 2, or the Bigfoot found wandering through Central Park last spring to promote Sasquatch Sunset. Meanwhile, interactive experiences produced by shows like Squid Game invite fans to do it for the ‘gram.
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The Severance stunt stands out because it merges both of these approaches: curiosity-provoking stunt multiplied by a factor of star power. Zendaya’s Thierry Mugler couture metallic suit may have captured fans’ attention, but her ability to pull off that futuristic piece renders her untouchable. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo “holding space” for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity” went viral because their highly emotional response seemed so out of the ordinary—at least to those of us non-theater kids. These famous people are not like us.
Director and executive producer Ben Stiller takes photos of the actors inside the installationCourtesy of Apple
It’s rare to see celebrities in the wild, let alone celebrities willing to sit in the middle of one of the busiest train stations in North America to be gawked at like animals at the zoo. And while Scott has not quite reached Zendaya-level fame, he is presumably too popular to be taking time out of his day staging a sort-of play in midtown Manhattan on top of the weeks’ worth of interviews (including with this magazine) he’s already done to promote the show.
Ben Stiller, the director, executive producer, and a key creative force behind the show, is certainly too famous to show up at this pop-up, let alone stand outside of it among the people, snapping photos on his smartphone like a proud dad at his kid’s dance recital. The fact that they all participated in the stunt speaks not only to their dedication to the show but a willingness to meet the audience, literally, where they are.
And, of course, the stunt works on a deeper level. The workers at Lumon are under constant surveillance with no sense of privacy. Sticking the actors inside glass box underlines the sci-fi series’ creepy themes of surveillance capitalism.
Severance is the sort of puzzle-box show that attracts a rabid fanbase obsessed with piecing together the clues and cracking its mysteries: What is the evil company Lumon up to? Why is the company keeping Adam Scott’s character Mark, specifically, under surveillance? Why are there baby goats in Lumon’s offices? The pop-up caters not only to these fans, who no doubt delighted in looking for even more Easter eggs inside the mini-Lumon office, but also to passersby on their daily commute who may never have watched an episode but will now, thanks to this curiosity.
If only they had managed to recreate the show’s famed Music/Dance experience—or at the very least, a waffle party.
